State agency gives $5M grant to North Shore colleges, incubator

A consortium of four colleges and an incubator collectively known as the Life Sciences Consortium of the North Shore has received a $5 million grant from the state to upgrade laboratories and equipment.

The grant, announced today by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, is aimed at helping to train students to fill the growing number of life science jobs in the area and giving early-stage companies there access to equipment through through the Beverly-based incubator run by North Shore InnoVentures. The colleges in the consortium, which was established in 2012, are Endicott College, Gordon College, North Shore InnoVentures, North Shore Community College and Salem State University.

“The key strengths of the consortium are the proximity of the institutions to one another, the willingness by each member to coordinate and share resources, and the advice of area industry to help shape academic curricula,” said Gene Wong, dean of arts and sciences at Endicott College, in a statement. “The capital grant from the MLSC will allow each institution to build upon their major strengths that will take academic research to a new level, give students broad training and career options, and give startup companies the resources to accelerate their development.”

In a separate announcement, North Shore InnoVentures said it received $1.65 million of the $5 million grant, allowing it to “expand its current laboratory facilities over the next three years and purchase advanced analytical instrumentation.” It said the planned equipment purchases will “strengthen the consortium’s cell imaging and cell-based analytics capabilities, as well as its mass spectrometry, tissue engineering, drug development and enabling technologies, and establish a next-generation sequencing center.”

“A number of leading instrumentation companies like Waters, Olympus, Sage Science, Bio-Rad, EMD Millipore, Life Technologies, and Thermo Fisher Scientific are providing expertise in identifying instrumentation that is most widely used in the life sciences industry, while maximizing the purchasing power of the Consortium members,” said Martha Farmer, CEO of North Shore InnoVentures. “All of the industry partners have pledged their support in training students, faculty, and industry employees by having staff scientists and technicians provide seminars on instrument theory, use, and applications.”